Quote Originally Posted by TaiyoShikasu View Post
The concept of artificial difficulty seems lost on a lot of players.
Well, the game "could" just play itself. Everything that you have to actually do as player is just artificial difficulty and tedium.

I see the term as more of a buzzword, truth be told. Like, boss mechanics? They're just clunky encounter designs where you're jumping around the arena more than playing your class. Totally artificial difficulty.

The actual questions are: Is it engaging? Is it interesting? Is it fun? All of them are subjective.

The way I see it, positionals are a decent enough class mechanic in trinity combat design where bosses focus their attacks on the tank and therefore only move as much as the tank himself. It's not much, it's not particularly interesting, but it's "something" to breathe some engagement into trinity design. A lot of class designs exist just for the purpose of making the trinity not boring by making you "fight against your own class".

The further you stray away from the trinity, via attacks that flat out ignore the tank and bosses that fly and jump around the arena and bombard it with all kinds of AoEs and mechanics, the more these things become superfluous and frustrating. You got other things to focus on and you'll miss a lot of positionals through no fault of your own, or lose your Enochian, stacks, or whatever due to jumps, invuln phases or plain movement.

That said, they might actually add a melee without positionals at some point. I wouldn't even preclude that they get rid of positionals altogether if their encounters become even less trinity-like, because then positionals will become more and more detrimental. But I wouldn't hold my breath.